It has been reported that the Donald Trump may not himself understand all the implications of yesterday’s repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), President Obama’s executive order granting residency to the children of undocumented immigrants. If that’s true, it’s odd that conservative media appear to know exactly what he is trying to do.

On the whole, Americans are well-disposed to the idea that children brought here by their parents should be allowed to stay. Not so the hardcore Republican base, many of whom still obstinately support a president that the electorate has abandoned.

Trump’s move – which punishes immigrants, trashes Obama’s legacy, and outrages liberals – serves to buy the continued loyalty of that small segment of the American public which has not yet abandoned him, and that of their tribunes in conservative media. The latter, apart from a few exceptions among libertarians, have spent the last day gearing up to defend what so many of their compatriots see as indefensible.

Author Shikha Dalmia is a writer for Reason, and a senior analyst at the Associated Reason Institute. Immigration is just one of the topics she regularly takes on there, and in other outlets like the Week.

Why you should read it The pro-immigration libertarians at Reason have not been well pleased by the Daca moves. Their set of concerns about hardline immigration policy are different from those of progressives – partly, they proceed from the impact that lessened labour market flexibility would have on their corporate sponsors. But they can also see that any move down the line to enforce the consequences of Daca repeal could easily become an authoritarian nightmare. Dalmia worries that Trump’s “morally reprehensible” move, and the politics surrounding it, are all heading in one direction: enhanced powers for the state and its agencies.

Extract “Trump’s move today seems designed to give the immigration hardliners in Congress vital ammunition to hold the fate of Dreamers hostage in order to extract concessions on enforcement action – funding to build the Great Wall of Trump, more appropriations for border patrol agents, etc. Indeed, immigration advocates who’ve approaching congressional Republicans for legislative action are finding little willingness among them to move anything Dreamer-related unless it’s tied to enforcement. The question is whether they’ll settle for a modest or a large “pound” of flesh.”

Author John Nolte quit as Breitbart’s media critic in the wake of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s manhandling of Breitbart’s Michelle Fields, and the website’s weak response. He’s just returned in the last week – not long after Steve Bannon made his way back to the helm after leaving the White House.

Why you should read it Nolte got this piece out suspiciously quickly after Jeff Sessions’s announcement. Under the guise of addressing “media lies”, he sets out the earliest iteration of what we can expect to be the nationalist right’s DACA talking points. The piece relies heavily on blaming Dreamer parents, and the idea that Dreamers are taking “American jobs”.

Extract “Then there is illegal immigration, which, like abortion, the MSM treats as its own personal sacrament. Flooding America, primarily Red States, with illegal Democrats who also serve the interests of a Big Business Complex desperate to keep wages low and unions non-existent, there is nothing our corrupt media will not do to keep that illegal flood flooding.”

Author Fred Bauer is a conservative blogger and opinion writer who is well practiced in affecting the clubby, National Review-style civility when discussing issues like the possible deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. With that said he’s no dill, and this survey of the politics of Daca on the conservative side is worth reading.

Why you should read it Bauer thinks that immigration reform could well be a lose-lose for congressional Republicans. They can either destroy a popular program, or retain some of its measures at the cost of alienating their anti-immigrant base. (The more feral sectors of conservative media will most certainly go nuts about the “establishment” making concessions that look to them like “amnesty”). His advice is to pass a bill that makes some concessions on reform, but steps up enforcement. If that’s the best they can do, we’re still in for a wave of deportations from a newly empowered Ice.

Extract “Thus, a stand-alone Dream Act hurts Republicans whether it succeeds or fails. In a politically polarized time, depressing the grassroots probably harms the GOP’s midterm chances more than disappointing some swing voters does, but both inflict a cost.

Perhaps the surest way to mitigate these political dangers is to bundle the Dream Act with immigration reforms that measurably advance conservative goals on immigration. What would these conservative goals be? One would be improving immigration enforcement. But an enforcement-only approach to immigration misses the broader importance of reforming the structure of the legal-immigration system. As Reihan Salam has suggested, conservatives should try to reform the immigration system so that it helps immigrants become equal partners in American society and ameliorates rather than exacerbates social divisions.”

Author David Harsanyi’s long career as a conservative opinionator includes his current senior editorship at the Federalist, his editorship of Human Events, and an op-ed column in the Denver Post.

Why you should read it Harsanyi mobilizes the argument that the right can be expected to continue to regard as a trump card: Daca, an executive action by President Obama, was itself unconstitutional, and an excessive use of presidential power. It hasn’t been struck down by any courts yet, but given the current configuration of the courts, it might.

None of this addresses the problem that Daca was an attempt to solve, which is largely of the right’s making. There are a large number of people living in America and who may wind up being deported because the nativist core of the Republican base won’t allow its legislators to carry out any kind of immigration reform, and want Obama’s legacy expunged. We’re stuck in the same place we were for the entirety of the previous administration.

Extract: “There are a vast number of solid economic and moral arguments for legalizing the children of illegal immigrants. In substance, I agree with Daca. Yet, the justification given by the president and his allies at the time was summed up best by the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who then argued that the “only reason President Obama has to act on immigration reform is that House Speaker John Boehner won’t.”

Why you should watch it: This is the red-meat counterpart to more genteel pieces like Harsanyi’s. Whether the latter likes it or not, he’s on a unity ticket with Alex Jones and his audience, who simply don’t like immigrants and want to repudiate Obama. The only difference is that Jones cannot countenance the idea that Trump might do anything wrong.